Well, yesterday was almost a wash. The day started strong. I got everything setup to rip the bench side tool well wall to size. Then I decided to kill a few electrons and use the circular saw to get the job done quickly. Simple enough right? Well the saw decided to go walking about halfway through the cut for some reason and basically made that piece of cherry unusable. That almost has me sworn off of power tools for all but the hardest tasks. With power tools when things go south it happens in a hurry and there is almost no recovery time but when working with hand tools you get the chance to stop, adjust and carry on.

Anyway, enough of that rant. That left me with a couple choices. Redesign the endcaps and tool well to accomidate the cut error or go out to HD and drop some $$ on a new piece of wood. I reluctantly opted for the HD route.

I came home with a piece of 4/4 oak that fit the bill along with some “common” wood for the well bottom that has some really nice quilting all the way through it. According to the guy who I spoke to there the “common” species around here is spruce. whatever it is this is a nice looking piece of wood. I just have one knot along one edge to deal with and it is basically 100% clear as well :D

I tried to get a pic of the quilting in this guy. You can see a bit of it here…

I also got some maple for the parallel guide and possibly a plane swap build ;-)

So after that I started cutting the wagon ends tenon so I can fit the endcap there and begin laying out the vise hardware.

Then I glued up the back of the tool well. This is yet another error on my part. I had intended to gut the groove for the well bottom in this before glueup but that slipped my mind in my rush to get this clamped so now I will have to do that with it installed on the bench.